This blog is about how, why and where to find old paths, trails, and roads in Virginia and the Carolinas. The short version is that one finds these old traces so as to identify archaeologically sensitive ground. You may be surprised to learn just how much remains of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. Through this blog we hope to engage your imagination and perhaps even your hands in the largest recovery project ever attempted in North America.

Monday, June 7, 2010

A cemetery myth

What We Can Tell From Unmarked Gravestones

Recently a neighbor described a "slave cemetery" she'd found. When asked how she had identified it as a slave cemetery, she said the stones were (all but one or two) unmarked. This belief is totally anachronistic. Blank stones, head and foot stones with no inscriptions are not the earmarks solely of slave graves in the South. First, illiteracy was the norm for all three prevalent races in the antebellum South, enslaved and free and, second, some religions disapproved of the use of grave marking.

Even within the vague ambit of race exclusive graveyards, it is nearly impossible to discern differences between slave graves and the graves of freed slaves, or those of other people of color; Native Americans, and multi-racial folk. Again, particularly in the case of colonial era graves and graves of the early republic it is all a matter of temporal and physical context.

Before asserting conclusions about the social and economic status, legal status of the residents of a graveyard, take the time to research the deed and grant records to ascertain if the land was associated with a church at any time. See if it was part of a plantation. But don't assume that if there is no documented use as a church site that it wasn't as the documentary record is very, very incomplete.

Before there were "plantations" in much of the south, there were communities of squatters, so graveyards can predate legal land records. In these cases, you may have to suspend judgment about the age of the graveyard and the makeup of its residents until after a careful archaeological analysis has been performed.

Before investing in archaeology, though, consider that graveyards are, by definition, sacred land. Archaeologists regularly invade sacred space to study burial procedures, grave goods, and so forth, but even for them it is becoming more and more difficult to rationalize disturbing final resting places. If we are unable to determine the racial or socio-economic identity of a corpse is it all that important? Probably not.

It should be sufficient to know that a graveyard exists. Mapping the landscape remnants of the graveyard; grave locations and alignments, head-stone and foot-stone locations, boundaries, and so forth should provide all the information one can reasonably extract from the earth. Mapping plus documentary research will tell virtually everything the present needs to know about the occupants. It is, in fact these spatial issues that are most informative, so, whatever you do, locate and map our graveyards for it is one of the most effective ways for us to get some understanding of the location and concentration of people in our common past.

Try to set aside anachronistic prejudices about the quality of a gravestones relationship to the quality of the grave's content. In and of themselves, unmarked gravestones can tell us practically nothing whatsoever except that 'neath those stones lie the remains of somebody once loved and missed and more or less tenderly laid to rest.

2 comments:

When I used to travel, I would look for an older cemetery. Just driving through showed the different understandings of death. There were always surprises. In the middle of a 19th-20th century setting, with expensive memorials and family plots... an expanse of Confederate gravestones.

Of course, Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond! A great focus on the history of that city and of Virginia... even... America.

Often in old family graveyards, there are heritage flowers... Which must be treated with utmost respect. As must all parts of burial areas.

About Me

I founded the Trading Path Association in 1999 to find, map and protect the remnants of the Contact Era in the backcountry of the southeast, on England's first frontier in North America. In 2009, as soon as technology allowed, some friends and I created the Hisoric Mapping Congress to facilitate public reporting and mapping of historic sites.
Currently I serve as CEO of the Trading Path Association, and I am a Roads Scholar for the NC Humanities Council.